>> Without the Moon, the Earth could nod through large angles, lying on
>> its side or perhaps even rotating retrograde every few million
>> years. Try making sense of timekeeping under such circumstances.

You mean like taking a sequence of atomic seconds, counting them
in a predicatable way and be happy that timekeeping has nothing
to do with geophysics ?

Yeah, I could live with that.

>Hang on a minute, statistically planets in the Solar System do not have a
>large moon and yet are "upright"; for example Mars comes very close to the
>conditions required to generate a leapseconds email exploder.